From Chilcot to ISIS

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The bombshell in Britain in recent days has been the long-awaited (seven years in the making) report by Sir John Chilcot condemning Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Most Britons, like most Americans, have long since concluded that the invasion was a disaster. But though the report fails to assign legal culpability (which many Britons who lost loved ones in the invasion hope to get), it does roast former prime minister Tony Blair pretty thoroughly. It says, in part, that his

 “judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—WMD—were presented with a certainty that was not justified” and “Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated….It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged, and they should have been.”

It also explicitly condemns Blair (known in Britain as ‘Bush’s poodle’), for blindly following the lead of President Bush, citing a letter Blair wrote in July 2002 promising that “I will be with you whatever…” This constituted Blair’s only success according to the report, i.e., successfully appeasing George W. Bush.

            That the report took seven years to appear is in part attributed (by a 2003 report in London’s Independent cited in Alternet’s account of the Chilcot release) to a “fierce battle” waged by the U.S. State Department and the White House as early as 2003 to block release of the report because it allegedly contained “classified information.” Whether the release of the report in 2003 would have saved lives, either British or Iraqi, is not known, but it might at least have caused some re-evaluation of the Bush administration’s rationale for the invasion, which in turn might have led to Bush’s defeat in the 2004 election. Instead, of course, we got four more years of the worst presidency in history.

            If this were the end of it, the Iraq war blunder would still count as a horror costing millions of lives, but not as grave or extended a one as what it subsequently turned out to be. For the current plague of ISIS attacks in Iraq, Syria and now throughout the Middle East and the world, stems directly from the hubris and secrecy of the Bush Administration during that time. This is made clear in a recent (first aired May 17, and again, when I saw it, on July 5) Frontline documentary: The Secret History of ISIS  (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis/). What the documentary reveals is how ISIS was able to thrive and grow through a series of blunders—mainly driven by “optics”—regarding its first leader, one Abu Musab al Zarqawi. We learn that Zarqawi was known to the CIA even before the invasion in 2003: according to Nada Bakos, a CIA analyst charged with looking into his background, Zarqawi was a tough kid who grew up in a tough neighborhood in Jordan, one who appeared on his way to a lifetime in prison as a thug, pimp, and general hardass covered with tattoos. But one stint in prison radically changed him: he became a jihadist, a holy warrior; and to demonstrate his zeal, he actually removed his tattoos by using a razor blade to cut off his outer layer of skin. After that, he left Jordan for Kandahar in Afghanistan, determined to join up with Osama bin Laden. But bin Laden ignored this wannabe from Jordan and in 2002, Zarqawi saw a chance to strike out on his own, this time in Iraq. He set himself up near the Iran/Iraq border and began building his den of crazies. Fortunately, the CIA had an informant in Zarqawi’s camp, saw him as a definite threat in the event of an invasion, particularly as Zarqawi’s group was apparently trying to build chemical and biological weapons. CIA analyst Sam Faddis, assigned to the case, therefore formed a plan to take him out, and forwarded the attack plan to the White House for approval.

            But the White House, in the person of VP Dick Cheney and his aide Scooter Libby, wanted no part of the takeout, especially before the big invasion, so Cheney and Libby drove to the CIA to undermine the CIA’s information. From their aggressive questioning, it was clear that the White House had more in mind than simply worry about a strike that might pre-empt their war plans. They had cocked up a narrative concerning Saddam Hussein’s al Quaeda connection and involvement in 9/11 as a big part of their casus belli. And when the CIA said there was no connection, it was clear that Cheney/Libby badly wanted there to be one. This would eventually lead to Colin Powell’s memorable speech at the UN, in which the Secretary of State besmirched his reputation by accepting the White House’s script—which he, uncharacteristically, read verbatim at the UN. And though the White House appeared to follow protocol by sending the script to the CIA for vetting, Nada Bakos testifies in the documentary that the White House simply ignored the CIA’s corrections and stayed with their required script. As Colin Powell authoritatively put it: 

“…there’s a sinister nexus between Iraq and terrorist networks. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants.”

When confronted in the Frontline documentary about this clear fabrication in his UN speech, Colin Powell claims that his memory now is vague, but insists that his references to Zarqawi were unimportant to his general case. The truth is that a full seven minutes of the Powell speech were devoted to Zarqawi who is mentioned no less than 21 times, thus firmly connecting Iraq and Saddam to the terrorist network that had already attacked the United States on 9/11. Not incidentally, Powell’s speech also transformed Zarqawi into a major terrorist directing a worldwide terror organization. It is almost as if Colin Powell created Zarqawi, and ISIS, at that very moment.

            From this point, everything that the United States did played into Zarqawi’s hands. First came shock and awe, tearing apart a nation. Then came Paul Bremer, the moron placed in charge of the Iraq Provisional Authority, who not only dismantled the entire governmental structure of Iraq, but then fired the entire military, leaving some quarter of a million experienced soldiers without a job or means of livelihood. Zarqawi wasted no time in recruiting thousands of these Sunni ex-soldiers, and they today form a major portion of the ISIS forces. Even General David Petraeus testifies in the documentary that the effect of Bremer’s move was “devastating” and planted the seeds of the insurgency. Zarqawi’s attacks began almost immediately, with devastating car bombs that turned Baghdad and the rest of Iraq into a charnel house of raging sectarian war. That he planned to do this was clear from a letter Zarqawi wrote laying out his plans. He wanted Iraq torn apart by sectarian conflict, he wrote, that would leave it vulnerable to his more ambitious plans to create a caliphate. Bombing the UN headquarters added to the chaos because both the UN and all the NGO organizations that might have provided some protection and order, immediately fled Iraq.

            It was at this point that Nada Bakos sent a briefing document to the White House saying specifically that Zarqawi was responsible for the major attacks and was looking to foment a civil war. It got to Scooter Libby, who then called Bakos and summoned her to his office, clearly to pressure her to change her main conclusion, i.e., that there was an insurgency in Iraq that threatened the entire American project. It was that word, insurgency, that the White House found toxic. It implied that the Iraqi people weren’t completely overjoyed about the American invasion. Again, it was the optics that the White House wanted to change. So the White House, especially Donald Rumsfeld in press conferences, ridiculed news reports that only focused on the alleged chaos—which they vociferously denied. The denial, of course, made it impossible to combat the insurgency, which was allowed to grow unhindered.  

            Zarqawi made the most of such denial. He instituted a reign of terror that had never been seen before, beheading American Nicholas Berg on camera to establish his credentials as a slaughterer of epic proportions (one of his monikers was the Sheikh of the Slaughterers). And though even Osama bin Laden tried to slow him down, objecting to the killing of muslims by other muslims, Zarqawi’s response was to blow up the most sacred Shia site in Iraq, the Golden Dome of Samara. This was the final straw for Shias, and all-out sectarian war ensued—exactly what Zarqawi wanted. Shortly thereafter, he showed himself on camera firing an American automatic weapon to emphasize his power and ruthlessness, as well as  his plan to set up an Islamic state as the first step in forming a global caliphate.

            We know the rest. Even though Abu musab al Zarqawi was finally killed in a drone strike, his fiendish methods and plans have been continued by his even more ruthless successor, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. What’s most disturbing is that all of this—the destruction of Iraq in the first place, the refusal to take out Zarqawi when the CIA wanted to, the idiocy of disbanding and setting adrift a quarter million potential fighters from the former Iraqi army, the mania to sanitize and justify the whole bit of lunacy in the first place—all of it might have been prevented if saner heads had prevailed. But of course, that is what marks the late lamented Bush Administration: lunacy and hubris (and an optimistic savagery) from top to bottom. At this point—with so many lives lost or ruined, and the Middle East in unprecedented chaos—all we can do is hope we shall never see its like again.

Lawrence DiStasi

SOTU Hoorahs for the Troops

Even for those of you who didn’t watch the State of the Union Address on Tuesday night, it will probably come as no surprise that the biggest, loudest, stompingest applause lines were those braying for our “heroes” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The assembled Congressional pooh bahs couldn’t cheer hard enough or long enough to demonstrate their appreciation, and of course, their conspicuous patriotism in supporting those who defend the ‘homeland.’ To cap it off, the Republican response was delivered by a plastic female clone named Senator Joni Ernst, who wasted no time informing us that besides wearing plastic bread bags on her shoes (just a poor Iowa girl like us), she had served for twenty-three years in the Iowa National Guard, with time in Iraq. Ergo, a woman and a super patriot to boot.

            Listening to all this, one would think that these hyper-nationalists would be falling all over themselves to demonstrate that not a single fighting hero would ever be abandoned by those sending them into danger. But one would be wrong. Just consider some of the cases found in NY Times reporter James Risen’s latest book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2014). What Risen reveals leads once again to astonishment and nausea at how truly scandalous was the conduct of that war from phony start to phony finish. The main point Risen makes is that the whole thing, including all the ancillary boondoggles connected with the overall ‘war on terror,’ was about making money—huge bundles of it, including pallets of hundred-dollar bills amounting to billions shipped by the New York Federal Reserve to Iraq on huge transport planes to disappear down the corporate gold mine that was Iraq. Here is how Risen sums up this initial caper to allegedly shore up the nation that ‘shock and awe’ had destroyed:

            Today, at least $11.7 billion of the approximately $20 billion the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] ordered sent to Iraq from New York is either unaccounted for or has simply disappeared (p. 19).

            But though this colossal waste of cash is breathtaking (just think how many schools it could supply, how many hungry kids it could feed), at least it didn’t directly affect the safety of the troops fighting the war. Other boondoggles were not as kind. Consider the fact, well known for years now, that Vice President Cheney’s company, Halliburton, and its then subsidiary, KBR, were given essentially no-bid contracts to supply the military with all the services that, when I was in the army, were done by we soldiers ourselves. A regular part of the service was KP, or kitchen duty, which everyone dreaded. So were laundry units and special units performing all the services and supply functions that a huge army needs to function. Not any more. In today’s privatized military, regular soldiers don’t do KP or any other kind of duty, including building army bases; nor does anyone else in the military. It’s all contracted out to private companies. And why? Risen provides the answer in one sentence: “KBR was the company that allowed America to go to war without a draft…It was the company that made it possible to prosecute wars of choice” (p. 143). Its personnel, over 50,000 of them, actually outnumbered the British Army in Iraq. Having gotten the government contract to provide military services by making a suspiciously low bid to beat out Raytheon and Dyncorp, KBR has since billed the U.S. government for upwards of $39 billion, refusing to even provide documentation for its billing. Risen gives them the same label given to the big banks, too big to fail; and why can’t they fail? partly because they provided after-retirement jobs to all those generals who were supposed to be monitoring their work. It was this—KBR’s virtual untouchability, even concerning the shoddy and often unsubstantiated work it provided—that led to real harm to American soldiers.

            Risen tells us the story of what happened at Joint Base Balad near Baghdad, one of the largest and busiest airports in the world, staffed by about 36,000 troops and contractors. Among its other duties, KBR operated the open burn pit at Balad, burning as much as 250 tons of waste a day through 2009. The trouble was, KBR didn’t separate its waste; rather, it simply burned everything, “from plastic bottles and food trash to computers, ammunition, oil, paint, medical waste, solvents, dead animals, batteries, appliances, and reportedly even amputated human body parts” (145). Balad was only one of several hundred such pits KBR operated throughout both Iraq and Afghanistan, their daily black smoke spewing so much toxic particulate matter throughout the war zone that living under the poison brew became part of daily life for American troops. The Centers for Disease Control eventually tried to survey the possible damage, giving epidemiologist Steve Coughlin the job. By 2012, Coughlin had found a clear correlation between veterans exposed to the burn pits and those who had been or were being treated for asthma or bronchitis. The evidence seemed to show that KBR’s burn pits had, in fact, damaged the lungs of American soldiers. Several other studies found evidence to support this conclusion. War lung injury began to join PTSD and brain injury as one of the common medical problems of the modern military, so much so that beginning in 2008, hundreds of veterans brought lawsuits against KBR, “seeking damages for their exposure to the burn pits in Iraq” (147).

            The problem was, the VA (Veterans’ Administration) and of course KBR had powerful incentives not to find any linkage between burn pits and lung damage: if the VA found a linkage, then it would have to pay benefits to the vets who suffered from it. So the VA, according to Coughlin, suppressed the evidence he had compiled. When he called in the inspector general, his supervisors at the VA became more intransigent, at one point citing him for insubordination. Eventually, he succumbed to the stress, and resigned from the VA. Even more pointedly, KBR was fighting its liability on the legal front. In February 2013, a Maryland judge dismissed the veterans’ joint lawsuit against KBR because, he ruled, KBR was working on behalf of the U.S. government, and so “could not be held liable for the effects of its war-zone operations” (150). Though Coughlin eventually testified before the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight, asserting that the VA had suppressed his evidence and manipulated data, at the time of Risen’s writing, Congress had done nothing; not even when one veteran, Timothy Lowery, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease after telling his son that he believed he had been poisoned by working in Iraq.

            Nor were burn pits the only liability attributed to KBR. In early 2008, Ryan Maseth was taking a shower in his army quarters in Baghdad. What was routine became a tragedy: Maseth was electrocuted and died while showering. Army officials at first suggested to his mother, Cheryl Harris of Pittsburgh, that it was her son’s fault: they said he had taken an appliance into the shower with him. A bit later they said her son’s death was caused by loose electrical wiring hanging down near the shower. Cheryl Harris didn’t buy either story, and eventually found that KBR, who had built the facility (hiring the cheapest workers it could get) where her son had died, had failed to update and ground the electrical wiring there. The death was then attributed by officials in Iraq to negligent homicide. But when this report got to Washington DC, the army’s Criminal Investigations Command reversed the finding, and informed Mrs. Harris that the death of her son had been “accidental.” Cheryl Harris continued to fight for justice in her son’s death, but KBR has refused to settle, at last report petitioning for its case to be settled by the Supreme Court. What this has revealed to Harris is that KBR is virtually untouchable:

            “After Ryan died…I was told by a military person [name withheld] that ‘KBR runs Iraq.’ Every ounce of my being didn’t want to believe that statement was true. Today, the CID confirmed that statement and I have an in-depth understanding of how KBR does run Iraq, and in a sense controls the US Army CID [U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command]” (p. 152).

            This and other instances cited by James Risen (himself under subppoena by the Obama Administration for refusing to reveal his sources in a CIA case) indicates the real hypocrisy at play on the night of the President’s State of the Union. Civilian officials fall all over each other in their race to demonstrate their zeal to support the troops, to celebrate their bravery and heroism, to take photo ops in their company. But when it comes time to actually pay for the damage they initiated, to hold to account the insider corporations they have indemnified from any responsibility (large contributions from such corporations seem to trump responsibility), they are the first to seek the exits. And the poor vets who thought their sacrifices were appreciated find out, once again, that the martial music may blare when the public spotlight shines, but in the dark night of their suffering, they are left silent, betrayed, and alone.

Lawrence DiStasi